Narrative Doubt

Posted on September 12, 2024 by thezman

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An often-ignored lesson of the Roman Empire is that exhausted institutions can stagger on for a long time on inertia. As long as there is nothing ready or able to replace it, the thing can carry on like a shuffling zombie. The Crisis of the Third Century should have collapsed the Roman Empire, but there was nothing around to replace it, so it could finally right itself enough to stagger on for another two centuries. Even a terrible imperial order was better than no order at all.

The same can be said for American conservatism. It has been dead as an intellectual endeavor for a long time, but it staggers on, trying to play the role for which it evolved in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. The audience for its content is limited to the nursing homes and retirement villages of America. Even in Washington, where it has functioned as a usefully idiotic opposition to the people we call the left, it has fallen on hard times. Conservative Inc. no longer has a raison d’etre.

Superficially, the decline of American conservatism is a remarkable thing, given its status at the turn of the century. Despite the Clinton years, conservatism still seemed to be driving the conversation in Washington. The failure of the first two years of the Clinton administration looked like proof that America was a conservative country and Conservative Inc represented the center of American politics. Today it is a terminal patient living out its last days as relatives look at their watches.

A level below the surface, there is the claim made by the people we still call the left that conservatism lost its reason to exist at the end of the Cold War. The argument they made back then was that Conservative Inc primarily existed as an opposition to communism, at home and abroad. The death of the Soviet Union meant conservatism no longer had an enemy. It was the dog that caught the car. Unless it could find a new purpose, it was following communism into the dustbin of history.

At the time this seemed true enough, but as we know conservatism easily found new bogey men abroad and the people we call the left were happy to produce new sticks for conservatives to chase domestically. We got the war on terror, the police state, and the old bogeyman of racism. What the fall of communism did was remove the veil of ignorance so we could see the true purpose of conservatism. It was the usefully idiotic opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy.

The trouble is conservatism was too good at the role of easily beatable opponent, which is why Donald Trump rose to power in 2016. It turns out that they got so good at being an easily beatable opponent that a flippant real estate mogul and reality television star was able to steamroll through the party’s A-list candidates and did so in a way that discredited the institution they represented. Conservatism was a house of cards and Trump was able to huff and puff and blow that house down.

While it is true that American conservatism is dead as an intellectual and organizational force, it still maintains its institutions and access to billions in donations. The reason for that is nothing has come along to replace it. There are efforts underway to fill that role either as willing punching bag or loyal opposition, but so far Conservative Inc. has kept a firm grip on the money spigot. As long as they have access to billions, they can play the political version of Blanche DuBois for as long as they like.

Nothing lasts forever and you get a sense of it in this post from one of the minor zombies shuffling about the cobwebbed halls of Conservative Inc. It is a version of the point-and-shriek we got from the usual suspects when Tucker Carlson had Darryl Cooper on to talk about historical narratives. We get the ritualized emotivism these guys always put at the top of their posts to let their masters know they are not going to be any trouble and then it is the standard attack on Candace Owens.

What the post reveals is that these people do not see what is coming next. The reason Tucker had Cooper on his show was not to make the case for why Churchill was a villain, but to open the conversation about the official narrative of the Second World War and by extension the American century. In other words, the point was not to provide an alternative history or answer reasonable questions about important events of the official narrative, but to legitimize questioning of it.

The official orthodoxy of this moment rests on the official narrative of the twentieth century and America’s role in it. It is what permits the toppling of statues and the desecration of graves. The narrative of the American century has allowed for a rewriting of the American story in such a way that it not only justifies the official morality of this age but forbids the questioning if it. Once people start questioning the story, it is not long until they question the point of the story.

Candace Owens is not an intellectual or even a serious political actor, but she is enormously popular with the sorts of people who used to follow the lead of conservative stars and who want to believe they are standing on the moral high ground. People like Candace Owens not only validate their oppositions to the fruits of the official narrative, but she also makes them feel good about questioning the narrative itself. Questioning the official narrative strikes at the cultural heart of the regime.

The writer of that post does not understand any of this because he lacks the intellect and the necessary curiosity. The reason conservatism got so good at being an easily beatable opponent is they selected for the type of people who enjoy being on the losing end of every fight. Critical to the slave morality of conservatism is a blinkered shortsightedness focused only on the immediate goal of currying favor with the master, or at least gaining her sympathy.

Like the Roman Empire, conservatism staggers on, mostly on the fumes of past glory, but the signs of collapse are showing. In the third century, it was the slow decentralization of power that foreshadowed the end of empire. In this age, it is the slow awakening from the myth of the twentieth century that foreshadows not only the end of conservatism but the end of the regime itself. That is the thing about collapse. The master does not see it coming, but neither do the slaves.

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Faith & Reason

Posted on September 9, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about bringing back penal colonies and exile to deal with crime, a post about how the fight with Old Scratch continues among the people we call the left and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Was Jesus rational? If you are a modern Christian, this is a question that probably sounds intentionally offensive or unintentionally ignorant. It suggests the person asking the question thinks Jesus was insane. Calling Jesus a crazy person therefore could sound deliberately provocative. On the other hand, someone asking the question could simply be ignorant. Only someone unfamiliar with Scripture or Christian theology could suggest that God’s only son was a lunatic.

This is not a question that would have offended early Christians, however, because they had a different relationship with faith and reason. The gods of the ancient world were not the defenders of logic and reason. Often, the gods were the greatest offenders of logic and reason, using tricks and magic to bring down the hero, even though the hero was acting rationally. After all, the tragic hero is often the man who does the rational things but is brought low despite his reason.

The ancients did not look at reason like modern man. They had to solve problems like all humans, but they did not worship reason like a god. In fact, reason was often viewed as a hinderance to understanding the gods. Understanding the gods and their relationship to man started with the understanding that the gods operated outside of the rationality of mankind. They had their rules, man had his rules, and the story of man was the interplay between these two worlds.

Of course, there was that sense that the fate of men and the individual man was controlled by things beyond human comprehension. It was not just the capricious gods who tripped up men, but that sense that there was something else going on to determine the outcome of life, something that was well outside the domain of man, a thing called fate. Just as the tragic hero was undone by fate, the hero was the man who recognized and submitted to his fate.

For most of human history, the key to making any sense of life was in accepting the mystery of the natural world and man’s place in it. That acceptance never meant understanding it, much less conquering it. The natural world was not a thing to be conquered or even challenged. It was a thing to be accepted. Therefore, for the early Christians, the irrationality of Jesus and his life would have made far more sense to them than the far more rational version of this age.

The phrase, “Athens and Jerusalem”, which turns up in certain parts of American conservatism has its roots in this question about the rationality of Jesus. The second century Christian writer Tertullian famously asked, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem” in response to those trying to make sense of faith. The absurdities within the story of Jesus are what gives power to faith, because the truly faithful believe the message despite the absurdities.

As an aside, “Athens and Jerusalem” was reintroduced to us by Strauss, who used it for a series of lectures and essays. No one knows what he meant by it as the main project of his students is to make themselves and their mentor as incomprehensible as possible on the assumption that “Straussian” is code for incoherent. Others have picked up the phrase as a way of weaving their ancestors into your family tree, thus making Western civilization the fruit of the Greeks and the Jews.

It is debatable as to whether Strauss clipped this phase from Tertullian in order to open the gates to ideas outside of Christianity. In the hands of lesser minds, it has led to idiotic concepts like “Judeo-Christian.” Tertullian would have happily lit the fire underneath the heretics promoting such an idea. Like the other Christian writers of his age, he was hostile to the Jews and wrote polemics against them. For their part, the Jews have never forgiven him for it.

That aside, there is little doubt that Christianity, as it spread throughout Europe, became a vehicle to introduce Greek thought to Europe. Not only did the Church preserve and reproduce ancient works, including the Greeks, it began to absorb the rationality that Tertullian would have found difficult in the organization of the Church and its relationship with the secular authorities that evolved in the Middle Ages. The irrationality of faith planted the seeds of the rational rejection of faith.

Therein lies the problem for the modern Christian. He has grown up in a world that worships reason to the exclusion of mystery. The point of human thought is to locate every mystery and strip from it all of its irrationality, so that it is reduced to a mechanism explained by mathematics. Reason is the hunter who poses with his kill for a picture he can use on his internet profile, because the beauty he sees in the image is him posing next to the kill, not the bit of nature he harvested.

The Christian who bristles at the “absurdity” the question posed at the beginning is a Christian forced to explain faith by the rules of reason. It is a hopeless project, which is why the churches have emptied out across the West. If the churches are to fill up again or new churches are to be founded, the modern Christian must confront the fact that the god of this age is rationality. That god must be overcome in order to be restored to his proper place alongside the mystery of life.

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Winners & Losers

Posted on September 4, 2024 by thezman

In sports, when a team prepares for a game, they think about all of the ways they can defeat the other team within the rules of the game. The good teams will be as expansive as possible when it comes to the rules of the game. If something is not explicitly forbidden, then they will assume it is permitted, even if convention and the unwritten rules of the game discourage it. The reason for this is the goal is to win, not uphold the traditions and customs of the game.

This is often the difference between winners and losers. The winners are always “pushing the envelope” when it comes to the rules. These are the guys for whom new rules are created because they discovered a loophole in the rules that gives them an advantage but might undermine the game. The people charged with protecting the game then make a new rule to close that loophole. The losers, in contrast, rarely think about finding loopholes and new interpretations of the rules.

Further, when the winner loses, he immediately begins to think about how to get around the limitations he sees to his success. Maybe it means changing how he or his team prepares for games. Maybe it is a fresh look at the rules that prevented him from doing what he needed to win. The loser, on the other hand, simply accepts that he lost and will often justify it within the rules of the game. The winner was simply better and that proves the rules, traditions or customs of the game are sound.

Put another way, the winners in all forms of competition look at the rules, traditions, and customs as a means to an end. The end is always victory. If the rules serve his ends, then he is a lover of the rules, but as soon as the rules prove inconvenient to his success, then he is an enemy of the rules. The loser is always a lover of rules, as they provide him comfort when he inevitably loses. The rules allow him to think that his role as loser is integral to the functioning of those rules.

This is why slavering works. The modern loser likes to think that slavery died out in America because it was bad economics, but this is nonsense. Slavery was fantastically successful as an economic practice. Slavery ended in America because the winners saw slavery as an obstacle to their success. The slave states wielded power derived from the practice of slavery that the northern states wished to overcome, so they decided to change the rules to rid the country of slavery.

The American Civil War is a complicated topic, but the index card version is familiar to anyone familiar with sports. The North kept losing to the South within the rules of the game of politics as set forth in the Constitution. Therefore, they did what winners always seek to do and that is change the rules. They won the Civil War by not allowing the rules, traditions, or customs of the young country to get in their way. Ever since, they have used control of the rules to secure victory.

Slavery itself is a great example of how winners and losers look at the rules, traditions, or customs as justification for their status. There is no greater lover of slavery than the slave, as the rules of slavery protect him from the whims of his master. The slave knows that as long as he upholds the rules, his master will show him mercy and kindness, so he is the great enforcer of the rules on his fellow slaves. One reason slaves seldom revolt is they prefer subjugation over uncertainty.

For his part, the master understands that the rules of human conduct among the slave owning class are a great tool to maintain the slave mentality of his slaves. His mercy and kindness is doled out like treats to a dog. He is not compelled by the rules to show his slaves mercy or kindness, so he does it as it suits him. This leaves the slave always seeking those things from his master, just as the dog is always ready for the pat on the head or the pleasant sounds from his owner.

In this age, we see this master and slave relationship between the people we call the left and the people we call the right. The former looks at the rules as a means to an end and that end is always getting what they want. Even the rules of physical reality are subject to interpretation if they prove difficult. In the hands of the people we call the left, the rules that supposedly regulate every aspect of life are merely the whip in the hands of the masters, who apply it to ensure obedience.

The people we call the right see the rules as every slave sees the rules, which is as a source of shelter from the uncertainty of their masters wrath. They invest their time in polishing their principles in the same way the house slave makes sure to always be seen busy tidying up the master’s house. This is a sign of subservience. David French is at the New York Times for the same reason the field slave rises to become the master’s manservant. He is the most resolute loser.

This is one reason the regime despises Trump. Unlike conservatives, the slaves of the system, he does not look at the rules as a security blanket. He wants to win so he is willing to reinterpret the rules to suit his needs. The people in charge see this as a challenge because they understand what it takes to win. A charismatic loser is easy to control, but a winner, even a boorish and thumbless one, is dangerous, because winners never stop trying to win.

It is also why the “right-wing influencers” have their panties in a twist over the Trump general election campaign. Despite their pretense to the contrary, the “right-wing influencer” is just another manifestation of the conservative loser. They suffer from the same slave mentality as all conservatives. Doing anything to win offends them because winning terrifies them. People born to be, at best, beautiful losers fear nothing more than winning as it reveals the ugliness of their reality.

Trump is far from a revolutionary character, but within the Trump phenomenon lies the seeds of a future revolt against the regime. That seed is the understanding that what matters is winning. That which serves the cause of winning is used and that which hinders success is discarded. Whatever rises up to topple this regime will not be constrained by the love for rules or the desire to follow the rules. They will be motivated only by winning, by any means necessary.

The New Athens

Posted on September 3, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about our robot overlords and a post explaining how you could have won millions on sports betting over the long holiday weekend, but the was no Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. Instead, I was on the Coffee and a Mike podcast and the J. Burden Show.

One of the features of this age is the proliferation of lying to the point where it is reasonable to assume everything is a lie. The West is a liar’s culture now, where only the naivest trust anyone or anything. This liar’s culture is led by the people at the top, who seem to take great pleasure in lying for its own sake. They often lie when the truth would serve them best. As a result of the endless downpour of lies from the top of society, the culture itself is drenched in lying.

At the top, the culture of lying is obvious. We just went through a month where the media and the so-called experts told us that a day-drinking simpleton went from the butt of jokes to heroic strong diverse female character. Of course, the fact that the concept of the strong diverse female character exists is a testament to the promiscuous lying that now defines the entertainment industry. Every ad on television now contains a naked lie, placed there like some sort of cultural totem.

This is filtering down to the rest of the culture. Online, social media is now full of fakers called “influencers” who create an image for themselves that is based on the lie that they are influencing how people view the world. The internet influencer has taken the line from the prior age, “fake it until you make”, and created a lifestyle around it in order to convince the world that they are something they are not. With many of them, it is clear that the lying is the primary appeal.

Of course, deceptive marketing has always been a part of retail economics, but now it is the default assumption. The key to marketing is to create a clever lie that does not necessarily fool people but stands out amongst the other lies. The ability to craft a clever narrative around a product or find a unique way to trick people into thinking they need the thing is a point of pride now. It has reached the point where it is expected, so that an honest appeal feels inauthentic.

You see the normalization of skullduggery in this post about how Facebook pitches itself to advertisers on its platform. The pitchmen laugh and boast about spying on users via the mic on their mobile device to target ads to them. There is no hint of shame at this sort of behavior, as it is both expected and the standard. We now live in a time when not cheating raises suspicions. If Facebook were not spying on its users, violating their privacy, everyone would think it is odd.

The sacralization of lying is not without precedent. The Athenians were famous for their lying and cheating. The Persian king Cyrus the Great famously observed that the Greeks made a habit of cheating one another through deception. Not only were they famous for their lying at the time, but much of what we know about the Greek world comes to us from notorious fabulists. Greek philosophy is the result of this culture that prized lying above all other virtues.

The reason the Greeks were such promiscuous liars is their culture relied upon persuasion to establish hierarchy and public policy. If an Athenian male were particularly clever at winning arguments and persuading the crowd, he would rise in status, which is why young males from prominent families were drilled in rhetoric. In Athens, you could rise to high status simply by being an unusually good liar. The Greek hero Odysseus was a hero because he was a fantastic liar.

This is the fruit of the democratic spirit. In a world where the standard is public opinion, winning public opinion is what matters most. In fact, it must count for more than the truth, as the public often accepts as true things that turn out to be false. If the goal is to win the crowd, then playing to their deeply held misconceptions is just as good, if not better, than disabusing them of those misconceptions. You are more likely to win the crowd through flattery than through confrontation.

This is most obvious in the marketplace. The seller has one goal and that is to get the maximum price for his product. The buyer has one goal and that is to pay the lowest price for the things he needs. Since these are the two things that define the relationship between buyer and seller, both sides have an incentive lie. If the only thing that matters is getting over on the other side, then the truth is not a restraint. As Cyrus noted, it means that Greeks freely lied to their brothers in the agora.

For the dimwitted, democracy in this sense is not the mechanics of casting ballots but the spirit that animates the people. The resulting morality that arises from a culture where persuasion is the standard against which everything is measured is going to be a morality that is intended to persuade the masses. The “good” is not rooted in factual reality, but in the needs of powerful interests whose power relies on winning the mob to their side to the point where it is a habit of mind.

It is how America has become the New Athens. Like the Athenians, we have embraced the democratic spirit to the point where factual reality is just one tool in the toolkit of persuasion that may or may not be used by the successful. The modern sophist is untethered from the truth, both spiritually and emotionally, because the only thing that matters is tricking some portion of the public. The road to riches is to be a clever liar, who even lies about his sincerity.

The lesson of the Greeks, one the framers understood, was that a society stripped free of truth seeking, even when blessed with great philosophers, will eventually persuade itself into a calamity. For the Athenians, it was the Peloponnesian War. For the New Athenians, it will be something similar, but until then sophists will be busy monetizing their predictions, because in the New Athens, the only thing that matters is lying, even if it is lying about the dangers that lie ahead.

Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto

Posted on September 2, 2024 by thezman

The title of this post comes from On the Laws, a Socratic dialogue written by Marcus Tullius Cicero toward the end of the Roman Republic. The title is from Plato’s famous dialogue, The Laws. In this work, Cicero creates a fictional conversation between himself, his brother and a friend about the law and social harmony. Salus populi suprema lex esto is a famous line that means, “The health of the people should be the supreme law”. Sometimes “health” is translated as “welfare.”

It is a famous phrase that turns up all over America. You can often find it in the official seal of cities and towns. Manassas Virginia has it in the town seal. A number of states have it in their official seal. It is not just in America where you will find it. All across the English speaking world this line turns up in the official branding of tiny villages, big cities, and important institutions. This concept of the ruling class being duty bound to the welfare of the people is near universal.

The reason for the ubiquity is it turns up in the foundational works of what we have come to call Western liberalism. It is the epigraph of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, arguably the most important influence on the Framers. Hobbes and Spinoza, influences on Locke, also used the phrase and embraced the concept as presented by Cicero. The Roundheads in the English Civil War also embraced the phrase and the meaning behind it.

Despite most Americans never having heard of Cicero, the spirit of this age is animated by the simple concept behind that Latin phrase. It is what lies behind the urge to censor speech online, for example. The welfare in question when demanding you get booted from social media is the psychological health of the people. The censors assume that they are the guardians of the mental peace and tranquility, so they must make sure that deviationists like you are silenced.

It is what lies behind the persecution of protestors in America and the UK. The striking similarity between the draconian punishments handed out by the UK government against those protesting immigration and those being persecuted in the United States over January 6 is not an accident. The people doing this are sure they are defending “our democracy” from hooliganism. They can think this because they assume their position requires them to defend the welfare of the people.

Of course, Cicero would have been baffled by what is happening in this age, especially since he was murdered by agents of the Second Triumvirate, for the crime of speaking out against the tyranny of Mark Antony. The modern notion that the state must safeguard the moral health of the people to the point of jailing those who dare question public policy would have baffled the ancients. From the perspective of the ancient world, what we are seeing today is the worst form of government, democracy.

As for John Locke, he was a man of his age and in his age the state, in the person of the king, was responsible for the material wellbeing of the people. It was the duty of the state to defend the lands of the people from outsiders. It defended the people from internal threat through the execution of the laws. The spiritual well-being of the people was in the hands of the church. John Locke would have been as baffled as Cicero at the Roundheadism of the current age.

In fairness to the modern age, the collapse of the Christian churches leaves a void as far as the spiritual guardianship of the people. Even a century ago, most Americans would have shared the same ethical outlook, because their ethics would have come from the Christian churches. Doctrinal differences aside, the ethics of the New England Congregationalist were not all that different from an Appalachian Presbyterian, a Southern Baptist, or a Midwestern Methodist.

The collapse of Christian institutions in the twentieth century meant something had to replace them as far as the ethical instruction of the people. Being the most powerful institution, it was natural that the state should take on this duty. Of course, the state was also responsible for the destruction of the churches. The peculiar composition of the post-war ruling class made Christian ethics a bit of a problem, so the ruling class slowly replaced those Christian ethics with a new set of ethics.

It is why it is important to understand that what we see happening is not merely the desire to hold power, but a religious revolt against the people. The bizarre outbursts we see are on the one hand an effort to demonstrate the weakness of the old ethics and the religion behind it, but on the other hand an effort to clear the path for the embrace of the new religion and its new ethical code. Woke is nothing more than proselytizing on behalf of the new religion, even if they do not realize it.

This is why the state has reacted with increasing ferocity at resistance to the cultural revolution from the top. Your efforts to reason with them or point to tradition are viewed by the ruling class as a radical rejection of their primary duty, which is to safeguard the welfare of the people. In the minds of the people in charge, they are on the side of a long tradition dating to the ancients. It is you and your weird adherence to out of fashion faith and custom that is subversive.

In the end, the present ruling elite of the West will not be judged by how well they upheld the traditions and ethics of the ruling class they displaced. It will not be their authoritarianism or anti-Christian bigotry that is their undoing. It will be how well they safeguard the welfare of the people. Since they have taken on the spiritual wellbeing of the people, they will be judged at how well they perform their priestly roles and the reasonableness of their new religions edicts.

Our Collective Theater Of The Mind

Posted on August 30, 2024 by thezman

A recurring plot line in modern life is the famous person being exposed for some sort of fraud about themselves or their work. For example, the notorious race hustler Robin DiAngelo was found to have ripped off black writers for her PhD thesis. It seems that the only reason we hear about people in academia is when they have been exposed for having broken the rules of the academy. Christopher Rufo has turned this into a cottage industry in service to his campaign for a color-blind America.

We are seeing this in the election campaign. Tim Walz is a serial exaggerator. It seems that all of the important parts of his life story have been enhanced in ways to make him seem like a hero in various narratives. He exaggerated his military service, so he pretends to be a war hero and preach against guns. He likes to call himself “an old football coach” but he never really coached football. He likes to pose as Elmer Fudd, but people who know about such things see that it is just a pose.

Walz is not the first guy to enhance his resume. In fact, it is now the way things are done by the beautiful people. The current governor of Maryland, a guy some think could be president one day, has a stolen valor problem. Note that like Walz, his story about himself is not an outright lie, but more like an exaggeration, in the way a good storyteller fictionalizes events in order to make the tale interesting. For most of our public figures, their life story is “inspired by real events.”

The main reason they do this is they usually get away with it. No one in the media will ask Tim Walz tough questions about his biography. When J.D. Vance pointed out the exaggerations, the media attacked him for questioning the patriotism of Tim Walz, which is such an outlandish thing to say it should be followed with lightning bolts striking the people saying it. Even so, fudging the resume has become the thing people do if they want to make it to the big stage of life.

Part of this is due to the shift from authenticity to prolificity. In the prior age, morality required a person to live an authentic life and present their life honestly. You were a bad person if you faked your resume or faked your public persona. Increasingly, the path to success is in creating a public image that is pleasing to the crowd and disconnected from physical reality. The reimagination of Kamala Harris is an effort to formalize this in the first fully online election campaign.

Another possible cause is the fact that public life has come to be dominated by actors hired by the economic elites to play various roles in public life. The days of a man getting rich and then going to Washington to represent his community or rising up in state politics are long gone. Rich people hire people to play the role of politicians, and they hire people to pressure and influence them in what has become the theater of democracy, a spectacle staged for our entertainment.

For Tim Walz, the most important thing about his otherwise mundane life was getting into the circus of politics. To do that he figured out how to take the facts of his life, reimagine them so they fit the character of a woke prairie populist. This act has taken him from community theater to the biggest stage in the circus. The reason he exaggerated the resume was that the act required it. If the act needed him to become a transvestite, he would do it. There is no dignity in show biz.

This is also why our politics are supercilious and narcissistic. Actors have always been known as supercilious and narcissistic because even the lowest member of the show has had to overcome a lot to get on stage. Often, they have had to degrade themselves in order to get a break. This is possible because they are sure they are the person they imagine on the stage, wowing the crowd. The actor always has an exaggerated sense of self and when it works, they are filled with confidence.

It is why we have Kamala Harris a click away from becoming the first halfwit hapa to become president. There is nothing authentic about Harris, not even her DNA, so she could be viewed as the logical end point of a process that has sought to strip all reality from politics and replace it with emotive narratives. Her campaign is running on “good vibes” because a world detached from reality has only emotion. Kamala Harris is the ideal candidate for a world that can only exist in our imagination.

It is also why we get people like Amanda Gorman, the official poet of the United States, whose poetry is nothing more than emotive nonsense. As John Derbyshire observed, it fails to qualify as poetry. It is why an incoherent simpleton like Kanye West can pretend to be a genius musician, despite lacking a shred of musical ability. Our public life is overrun with carnies who think they are the role they play. The result is a public life not detached from reality, but at war with the concept of reality.

It is tempting to assume this cannot last, but reason says it should never have reached this point, so maybe it can last. The idea that reality may possibly be a figment of our imagination has been with mankind for as long as we know. Perhaps the long arc of humanity ends with proving this correct. The escape from the human condition is the embrace of the collective theater of the mind where all things are possible. Alternatively, maybe the machine just stops and then the theater goes dark.

The Faith Of Our Betters

Posted on August 29, 2024 by thezman

Western elites are in a competition with one another to see who can be the most creative in violating the old rules of the liberal order. Every week seems to bring a new outrage from a Western government. The reason it seems like they are looking to outrage rather than work from an understood ideological foundation is that they do not fully understand their new ideological foundation. It is an evolving paradigm, as they used to say, to which they are forced to adapt.

A good example is this rather weird story out of the UK. A company was taken to court because they paid warehouse workers more than their retail workers. The warehouse staff was predominantly male while the retail staff was predominantly female, thus creating a situation in which men are earning more than women. The company pointed out that this is normal and there was no evidence that women were discriminated against in hiring or evaluations. They lost the case anyway.

Something called an employment tribunal agreed that “the difference in pay rates between the jobs was not down to direct discrimination, including the conscious or subconscious influence of gender on pay decisions, but was caused by efforts to reduce cost and enhance profit. Even so, it ruled that the “business need was not sufficiently great as to overcome the discriminatory effect of lower basic pay.” In other words, it just looked bad so it must be bad.

This is like saying that a man was not directly or indirectly responsible for the death of someone he did not like, but the man’s death just looked bad, so the fellow who did not like him will be convicted of murder. In the new normal, you can be guilty of violating a rule or law, even if you did not actually violate the rule or law, simply because the rule or law is not getting the intended result. You could literally end up in a British jail because the judge thinks it looks bad for you to remain free.

For those familiar with American discrimination law, this may sound like disparate impact, which is a legal term that refers to practices that unintentionally discriminate against people of protected groups in areas like employment and housing. This doctrine was imported to the UK for the same insane reasons it exists in America. It is the only way around objective reality while maintaining the radical delusions of universal human equality and the blank slate.

The logic of disparate impact works like this. Since there are no immutable differences between people or groups of people, any differences between groups of people must be due to some form of discrimination. Logically, there can be no other reason if universal equality is true. Therefore, if there are group differences that negatively impact nonwhites, then it must be from discrimination by whites. Discrimination is the ghost in the machine that explains what we see every day.

That is not what appears to be going on with this UK case. The tribunal clearly stated that the company policy is neutral, as far as intent and application. Apparently, there are female warehouse workers who make what male warehouse workers make and male retail workers who make the same as female retail workers. It is just that females prefer retail while males prefer warehouse work. This bit of biological reality is so disturbing to the court they ruled it must be eradicated.

It is a good example of two things we see with the new religion we see with the managerial classes in the West. One is there is a strong whiff of world rejecting Gnosticism about it. It is never clear if they are trying to recreate the human condition to their liking or they simply reject the human condition along with the objective reality in which mankind resides. Perhaps Justice William O. Douglas’ use of the terms “emanations” and “penumbras” was a clue.

The other thing you see is how the power of narrative warps their sense of reality to the point where it is often at odds with reality. This is something we keep seeing in things like the Ukraine war and now the Harris campaign. The narrative provides an a model of reality that is untethered from physical reality, so they must always be altering their mental model of reality. Alternatively, they seek to force reality to comply with the demands of their alternative reality.

It is not hard to imagine the judges in that UK case thinking, “We know how things should be, so even though they are not that way, and we cannot find evidence of Old Scratch in this, we will just set everything right and all is good.” There is no thought of the secondary and tertiary consequences to their ruling. If the company automates it retail area to address the problems created by this ruling, they will be back in court to explain why they are not living the court’s model of reality.

All the loose talk about creating a new religion misses the fact that we have a new religion, the religion of the managerial class. This new religion has roots deep in the Western tradition. Not only does it contain the egalitarianism and universalism of Christianity, but it also has the mysticism from the ancients. At the heart is the suspicion that reality is a figment of our imagination, so if we reimagine reality then we can have a reality that frees us from the human condition.

In the end, this weird new religion is a luxury good. The parade of lunacy we see is only possible because the masses have food and entertainments. Each new bit of lunacy chips away at it but until it reaches a critical state, the cost of these religious fantasies is spread around the respective economy. The great enabler of managerial lunacy is the ability to socialize the cost of it. At some point, the cost becomes unbearable, and the new religion goes into the dustbin of history with its adherents.

Starting A New Religion

Posted on August 28, 2024 by thezman

There are three things true about the modern West and all three of them are connected to the issue of religion. One is the obvious fact that the religion of the West, Christianity, is in steep decline. The second is that the West itself is in a steep cultural decline, which may be the result of the decline of Christianity, or it could be another symptom of a deeper issue behind both of those problems. Then there is the ongoing invasion and subjugation of European people in their own lands.

Objectively, occidental people look more like Native Americans right now, in terms of the things we can measure, than their ancestors of the last century. Low birth rates, declining life spans, rampant discrimination against people of European heritage, drug and alcohol abuse. Like the Indians on the reservation, European people now live at the pleasure of an alien ruling elite. As we are seeing in the UK, European people no longer have their ancient rights in their own lands.

What needs to happen to arrest this process is for occidental people to fight back against the gathering darkness. For that to happen, people need to be inspired to sacrifice for something and the best way to get people to sacrifice is through the mechanism of religion. A healthy people have a religion that reflects what they love and celebrate about themselves. This is what provides the motivation to sacrifice present happiness for the future happiness of their people.

The trouble with this line of thought is that the religion of the West, Christianity in its various forms, is in total collapse. That means creating a new religion, but new religions do not have a great track record. Not only that, the secular religion of the West, liberalism, is drenched in Christian priors. If you want to start a new religion, you not only have to contend with the old religion, but that which has slowly displaced it in the name of secularism and openness.

On the other hand, you could take a page from the last successful new religion, Mormonism, and create a spinoff of sorts. It is debatable as to whether Mormonism is a Christian denomination. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints consider themselves Christians. They share many Christian beliefs, such as the divinity, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the end it does not matter much as they managed to make it work and continue to thrive.

In other words, the Mormons rebooted Christianity in a new religion that served the needs of a growing number of people who did not see what they wanted or needed in the existing Christian denominations. Another way of putting it is a group of religious entrepreneurs saw an untapped market and created a product that fit the needs of this underserved market for religion. They set about creating a new religion, using many of the familiar parts of the existing religion.

The first task of Joseph Smith and his early converts was to create a new moral authority for his new religion. In order to avoid the trap of current interpretation of Scripture, Smith said he was visited by an angel who led him to the “golden plates” which would form the basis of a new religious text and the foundation of the religion we call Mormonism. The Book of Mormon is not another Gospel or considered Scripture, but it sits alongside Scripture for the believers.

The important thing about this additive process is that Smith was recentering the moral authority of Christians between the God of the Old Testament and the God of Jesus and the New Testament. The Hebrew God is masculine, cruel, and often terrifying, while the God of Jesus is infinitely merciful and benevolent. God of the Old Testament is a warrior who loves the smell of burning flesh. The God of the New Testament is a loving mother who always forgives you, no matter what.

By the 19th century the Christian God was becoming something of an alien weirdo, especially to men. How could a man trust a God who cannot savor the thrill of dominating his opponent or who cannot enjoy sin? What is the point of worshipping a God who will forgive you if you fail to worship him? Men sacrifice their goods and their person, not because of trust, but because of fear, a fear of the consequences of doing otherwise, either from their fellows or from their God.

The Christian was no longer a sinner in the hands of an angry God, but a sinner who was clutched to the bosom of a loving God. The former did not care if sin was an inevitable plight of man. You were still going to be punished. The latter did not care if you sinned or that you did so with guilt free enthusiasm. You were welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven just as long as you accepted Christ. The masculine God was gone from the house of man and the feminized God was in charge.

What Mormonism did was recreate the authority of Christianity as something that could both inspire men and terrify them. It is from this reimagined authority that the new rules of the new religion rest. Modern Mormonism may have been feminized over time, like everything else, but there is no doubting its initial masculine appeal. A God that promises men multiple wives is a God who both loves man and also enjoys, at times, tormenting him with too much of what he desires.

The other thing about this new masculine God and his new followers was that they were exclusive and it was not easy to join this new religion. Anything that is easy to obtain quickly loses its value and this was the curse of Christianity by the 19th century. To be a Christian of any type, maybe multiple types, was no more challenging that buying a new suit or changing fashion styles. Then as now, the mature Christian denominations asked nothing from the believers other than cash.

The early Mormons had to suffer, and to some degree they are still required to suffer, due to their peculiar habits. Smith and his followers were chased around the Midwest by angry mobs who viewed them as dangerous heretics, until an angry mob eventually killed Smith and his brother. Smith was a martyr for his cause, but unlike Christ, he was not a martyr in denial of human reality, but a martyr in service to the people of his new religion, thus an example for all of them.

Regardless of how you feel about Mormonism, it is a great example of how to form a new religion from the rubble of Christianity. Smith was the product of the Second Great Awakening, a period of renewal for Protestant sects that had lost their way and a time for new approaches to the life of Christ. Adventism and Dispensationalism also came from this period of religious revival. The Social Gospel Movement also had roots in the Second Great Awakening.

If any society and people are due for another “great awakening” it is the people of the occident who find themselves on the cusp of oblivion. If you are thinking about starting a new religion or resurrecting an old religion, now is a good time, as there are millions of people unhappy with the current offerings. It might also be a good time to reimagine God as something more terrifying than the benevolent old black guy who is happy to drive around Miss Daisy.

Abortion Inc.

Posted on August 27, 2024 by thezman

A new trend in the world of internet politics is a reboot of an old trend in actual politics and that is the abortion issue. Abortion was good politics for both parties since Roe because it let them posture without having to do anything. The Democrats promised to defend abortion and Republicans promised to end it. Meanwhile the issue languished in the courts until the Trump court overturned Roe. Since then, both sides of the abortion battle have been trying to revive their money maker.

To some degree, they have been successful. The people we call the left have convinced themselves that the election will turn on abortion. They generate fake polls and fake news stories to goose the online influencer community. Of course, the most gullible of that bunch, the right-wing influencers, take the bait. There is no group less politically astute than the right-wing influencers. The media then uses online chatter to talk about the abortion issue as if everyone cares.

The truth is, no one cares. Just two percent of people list abortion as a major concern going onto the election. As always, economics is what matters. The people who care about abortion are the most predictable voting bloc in America. The pro-abortion people vote Democrat and the anti-abortion people vote Republican. It is why both parties took these voters for granted for fifty years. They knew that these voters would never alter their behavior.

The new wrinkle this time is also a reboot, of sorts. The usual suspects are now running a media campaign online trying to convince people that Evangelicals and pro-life people are abandoning Trump because he opposes a federal abortion ban. The abortion ban idea is a last gasp effort to keep the abortion rackets going. If they cannot pretend to fight over Roe, maybe they can pretend to fight over whatever they will call the bill, if they ever get around to drafting one.

Republicans Against Trump (R.A.T.) have been spinning up fake pro-life and Evangelical accounts on Twitter, now stupidly called X, who do the classic bit of pretending to be a disillusioned former supporter. “I have been a lifelong X, but I will not support Y because he is not 100% in favor of X” is one version. The other version is “I have always voted for Y, but because of X I cannot support Y this time.” The R.A.T. people have invested heavily in this gambit.

The result of this is we have one side pretending abortion is the pivotal issue of the campaign and the other side using abortion to undermine Trump. For his part, Trump has staked out what was the conservative position on the abortion issue since the courts sacralized it in the Roe decision. The American system is designed to send normative issues to the smallest political unit of the country. Therefore, it was un-American for the court to impose Roe on the country.

The stated goal of the pro-life movement for decades was to overturn Roe and then fight it out on the state level. Trump delivered his end and Pro-Life Inc. will never forgive him for it, but the general public is thankful. A dirty little secret of the abortion issue is that people would rather not talk about it. Normal people find crotch warriors to be icky and strange. Moving abortion out of national politics means never having to think about abortion again and for that the public is thankful.

This is, however, another bit of mask dropping for the so-called right. Professional Evangelicals, professional social conservatives and the usual suspects have abandoned their old federalist principles in favor of a national abortion ban, because they think it is good for business. Once again, we see that those “conservative principles” they never shut-up about are relative, relative to their ability to make money off of them. Everything about conservatism is a racket.

The fact is, however, the conservatives of fifty years ago were right to argue that Roe was a terrible decision because it violated the American social contract. For a big, diverse, and complicated country like America, there are few normative issues about which you can get broad support across all regions. Therefore, most issues, like abortion, are best managed locally. Just because they now think it is more profitable to argue against this does not make it less accurate.

It is what makes a federal abortion ban every bit as immoral and un-American as the Roe v. Wade decision. On the one hand, it violates the basic American notion that moral issues should be decided locally. Family issues are decided by the family. Community issues are decided by the community. On the other hand, it is an effort to impose the morality of the minority on the majority. This runs counter to the long held American opposition to minoritarianism.

In the end, the abortion issue is symbolic, in that it represents the old civic nationalist America of the late 20th century. People could argue over abortion, because the much larger issues that come with cultural decline were still far down the road. As those larger issues now appear much closer, abortion, along with the civic nationalist culture, is fading into the history books. As civic nationalist America gives way to tribal identity America, the debate will be tribal, not civil.

The New Christianity

Posted on August 26, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the send gamers to labor camps, a post about finance socialism and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Was Jesus a loser? By the standards of the age, the human standards, he was most certainly viewed as a loser, with the exception of his followers. That was the point of crucifying someone in that period. The Roman authorities used the practice as a form of humiliation as well as capital punishment. The point of displaying the condemned as they suffered and died was to let the rest of the population know that the guy on the cross was at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Modern Christians would take exception to calling Jesus a loser, but early Christians would not have been offended. The humiliation of Jesus was integral to both understanding the life of Christ and the message of Christ. If the Romans or the Jews had executed Christ in the fashion reserved for prominent people, then the life and message of Christ would mean something quite different. The stripping of all human dignity at the end was essential to the life of Christ.

Therein lies the problem for modern Christians. By the standards of this age, Christ is a loser, just as he was two thousand years ago. The message of Christ not only runs counter to the way in which modern people live and are expected to live, but the bad end runs afoul of how modern people expect the life of a hero to end. The modern person expects the hero’s life to end in a great triumph and universal acclaim or at least the acclaim of the major characters in the story.

Of course, the message of Christ does not work too well either. Eschewing material prosperity is just not a thing people do in this age or for a long time. In fact, the point of life for a long time has been to increase your material wealth. All of the heroes of the modern age are those who either got rich for their own sake or got rich for having upheld the modern morality. The way around this for the modern Christian is some form of the prosperity gospel, but that often looks like a grift.

More important, the message of Christ was aimed at the losers. From the start, Christianity was a religion for losers. Its appeal assumed that the audience was composed of people who were losers and would remain losers until they died, which would probably be soon. For them, investing in this life made little sense, so they should invest in the next life. Their time on this plane of existence was best used to prepare for everlasting life in Christ.

It is a powerful message if you are a loser and most people in the late Roman Empire and post-empire Europe were losers. Nasty, brutish, and short is a famous line from Hobbes to describe pre-society man, but it was also a good description of life for most people in the early Christian era. It was true for many people when Hobbes was writing in the 17th century. The typical person was subjected to violence, disease, and the constant fear of running out of food.

A religion that tells the losers that their suffering is part of a transition from this life to everlasting life and bliss is going to find a lot of interest. The folk religions of the age were not so rosy about what comes next. Worse yet, if you were going to get any sort of reward in the next life, it meant living this life heroically. That did not offer much for the peasant farmer or the man tied to the land. It is not hard to see why a religion for losers would spread rapidly through Europe at the time.

This insouciant description of Christianity as a religion for losers is not intended as an insult to Christians or Christianity, but to make a point. The rise of Christianity in the West was due to two things. One is the majority of the population, even the upper classes, lived harsh lives. Therefore, a promise of relief from suffering and everlasting life had a strong appeal. The second factor was the embrace of this life as a means to an end, rather an end in itself.

Fast forward to this age and you see that poor people live lives of luxury relative to just a century ago. The typical poor person in America is obese because he has unlimited cheap food. His home is full of conveniences and entertainments. Even in the most terrifying modern ghettos, violence is a fraction of what people experienced even a few hundred years ago. A religion aimed at people living a life of misery is not going to sell to a population living in luxury.

Compounding the problem is a new religion of sorts has evolved in the West that celebrates material success. The point of life, according to the new religion, is to increase your material wellbeing. The point of the state is to foster those conditions and measure success by society-wide material increase. In every election, the economy is the top issue because in this age, we worship stuff, so the promise of more stuff is a sign of virtue. The point of life is more stuff.

A much bigger problem for Christianity is the fact that the ruling elites of this age have no use for Christianity. In the Middle Ages, not only did the ruling elites have lives of struggle, but they also saw utility in a religion that shifted the focus of their people from their current squalor onto what comes after this life. Marx was not entirely wrong when he wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Probably the biggest challenge for Christianity is the modern Christian, who like the modern grammarian, refuses to evolve. The grammarian clings to the rules of grammar as if they are timeless truths. Any thought of ignoring them for the sake of clarity is treated as a crime against humanity. The fact that most of what he clings to is a relative new invention is lost on him, because what matters most to him is wielding the blue pencil like nuns used to wield the ruler.

This is the problem with the modern Christian. He is ossified in a mode of thought that is relatively new. Transport a modern Christin back to medieval England and he would be burned at the stake as a heretic. Plop him down among the early followers of Christ and they would be baffled by his Scriptural dogmatism. The early proselytizers charged with converting the pagans would find the modern Christian to be a rigid and irrational burden on their work.

Christianity, as we understand it, is the result of a long evolutionary process that adapted the life and message of Christ to the audience and times. The inability and unwillingness of modern Christians to evolve and adapt is probably the biggest challenge facing Christianity. Put another way, the problem with modern Christianity is not its opponents, but its most dogmatic defenders. They have made failure their security blanket and refuse to let go of it.

If Christianity is going to survive, it will have to adapt to this age and repurpose itself as a replacement for liberalism, rather than an enabler of it. Christianity gave birth to liberalism, but it does not have to sink under the waterline with it. Instead, it will have to either replace it with a new Christianity or give rise to a secular alternative that cannot just coexist with Christianity but allow it to once again flourish. Otherwise, Christianity will go into the dustbin of history along with Western civilization.

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